It all comes back to the Capitol insurrection. It’s at the heart of the battle that is, four months later, tearing the House GOP apart. Increasingly, Republicans paint 1/6 as a rowdy and raucous event, an arguably understandable but certainly embarrassing one in which hundreds of people illegally marched into the Capitol and, for a few hours, occupied its halls. There was some unfortunate violence; it should be prosecuted. But you don’t endlessly, ruthlessly and for political reasons bring governmental force down on members of a crowd that got carried away. America is a nation in which crowds get carried away. They didn’t tear the place apart, as street rioters did last summer. It was goofballs dressed in antelope horns. So get a grip, maintain perspective.
There is some truth in this. But it dodges the larger, defining and essential truth.
That has to do with the expressed aim and intention of many rioters. It wasn’t to roam the halls and yell. It was something grave and dark: to disrupt and prevent the constitutionally mandated counting of the Electoral College votes in the 2020 presidential election. That was scheduled to occur in Congress that day. That act of tabulating is more than two centuries old, formalizes and validates the election outcome, physically represents the peaceful transfer of power, and has never been stopped or disrupted. What happened on 1/6 was an attempted assault on the constitutional order.
It was instigated by a lie, the one Donald Trump told his supporters starting the day after the election: that it had been stolen and was fraudulent. And, in time and implicitly, that the certification of results could be thwarted.
After the election every attempt to prove it was stolen failed. Recounts failed, more than 60 court challenges failed, some before Trump-appointed judges. Dominion Voting Systems launched lawsuits against those who slandered it. The nutty Trump lawyers dummied up and scrammed.
The former president is undeterred. He insisted in a statement this week that the idea that he lost the 2020 election is “THE BIG LIE!” Rep. Liz Cheney famously responded in a tweet: That the election was stolen is actually the big lie.
Under attack by House colleagues she will almost certainly be stripped of her leadership position next week.
Why did she take the bait of this slowly waning figure, Mr. Trump, and the gravy-train operatives around him whom others in Washington call “the unemployables”? Because, as she wrote days later in the Washington Post, if the former president is allowed to keep telling his lie unchecked and unresisted it will only dig in and spread, and the foundations of the Republic begin to crack. “Trump has never expressed remorse or regret for the attack of Jan. 6 and now suggests that our elections, and our legal and constitutional system, cannot be trusted to do the will of the people.”
And so the latest battle in the Republican civil war. The pro-Trump side is believed to have the larger ground force, while the anti-Trump side has greater air cover, in terms of media support.
Members of the House Republican Conference should breathe deep, cool down, and think twice. There will be great cost to the party if it removes the only woman in the House leadership and the only one pushing back against Mr. Trump. Ousting her for saying the obvious puts the party on the side of a lie. That’s never a healthy place to be in the long term.
The Republicans like to call themselves a big tent. Ms. Cheney is in that tent, a woman who isn’t in the boys club and yet has been respected by the boys. If they throw her out she looks like Churchill, and they look like little men with umbrellas. It will make the party look stupid and weak, as if it can’t tolerate dissent. Republicans like to call for diversity of thought on campuses. What about in the Republican Conference? Giving her the boot places Mr. Trump at the center of things, and is a gift to President Biden, taking all the heat off his programs and policies.
House Republicans keep repeating that Donald Trump won 74 million votes, more than any Republican presidential candidate ever. But Joe Biden won 81 million votes. There was historically high turnout in a divided country. The Democrat won by seven million votes. That’s not something for Republicans to brag about.
In a move the men who run the House GOP take to be sophisticated, they hope to replace Ms. Cheney with a woman, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik. It will haunt the rest of her career if she allows the boys to swap her for a woman who stood where she stands at a cost and for principle. A former member of Congress said this week: “When you’re replaying ‘All About Eve,’ you don’t want to play the part of Eve. You want to be Bette Davis. ” You don’t want to be the conniving understudy who takes out the star. Whoever replaces Ms. Cheney will be elevated by a conference that booted a woman for telling the truth but has expressed little criticism for, say, Rep. Matt Gaetz, reportedly being investigated by federal agents to determine whether he had sex with a minor (he’s denied it). Odd, isn’t it?
More oddness: The truth in this case isn’t really at issue. Ms. Cheney’s colleagues are ejecting her not because they think she’s wrong on the facts. They know she is right. They know Mr. Trump lost the election and Mr. Biden won. Most of them know it’s not good if embittered generations of voters turn on the system and come to feel no fidelity to democratic outcomes.
They just don’t want her to say it. They don’t want to antagonize constituents who believe the election was stolen. They think Ms. Cheney is doing so, pointlessly. They think the way out is to be quiet and hope the fever passes. Here is a fact of our current political life: The fever never passes. It has to be treated. By not pushing back they create more crazy.
And it’s not an argument about policy. Ms. Cheney supported Mr. Trump on policy issues, in many cases more often than her opponents did. In any case, Trump supporters aren’t all about policy. They want to close the border to illegal immigration; their inflection is populist and nationalist, but mostly they believe in standard Republican things, such as that taxes and spending should be lower.
The Cheney drama has an underappreciated subtext, however. She has called hard for a Jan. 6 commission to investigate formally what happened that day, which is a problem for some Republicans, not because they don’t want to relitigate the past but because there are members who are uneasy about what such a probe might unearth about their own actions.
Here is the problem of House Republicans: No matter how pro-Trump they show themselves to be, there will always be someone back home who’s Trumpier. They’re jumpy and scared, fear a primary challenge, and probably know deep down the inquisition won’t stop with Ms. Cheney.
In times of high heat, get cool. They shouldn’t do what they’re going to do next week.